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Monday, October 14, 2013

Real Men Don't Pluck Their Eyebrows

My shoes now have a serious rip across one of the soles, so I've started walking barefoot.This makes me a little bit of hippie, and tough - tough as nails, but not quite as tough as the tiny piece of glass that lodged itself in my heel last night.

I couldn't see it. I could barely make out the break in my skin that it had come through. And most of the time when I walked, I couldn't feel it. Then it would remind with a stabbing pain.

The obvious solution, to hop everywhere, seemed like it would put me at risk losing some of my cool, and while I have plenty to spare, it seemed like there should be a better way.

I whipped out my Swiss army knife and some alcohol pads. I prodded and cut. From time to time I felt my knife scrape against it. I accidentally nudged it and felt the pain, again and again. I tried to get the tip of the blade underneath it, but I still couldn't see it, so there was only more nudging and scraping.

I looked up online how to get glass out of your foot. For all of you who have been chuckling at my expense, apparently there is a whole community of people out there with glass in their feet, and so I found some sage advice.

GroovyGreas: Just leave it. It'll come out on its own.

BarefootBandit: I have three inch scar from when I left a toothpick in my foot and it got infected. Eventually it was surgically removed and they almost had to take the whole foot.

GroovyGreas: Skin replaces itself. It'll fall out. You'll be fine.

RealMD: You can suck it out. Don't use your teeth because it can scratch the enamel.

BarefootBandit: Soak it in hot water.

BeerLord: Use a beer bottle! Heat it in hot water and then place it against the glass. As the bottle cools the vacuum will pull it out.

I decided to go with BeerLord, and quickly found an empty wine bottle in the Lega Navale. I used my stove to boil water, then put the empty bottle in. After a few minutes, I removed the bottle and placed it against my foot.

It didn't work so I tried again ... and again. Maybe I wasn't getting a good vacuum. It seemed like it should have worked, if for no other reason than because it would have been cool.

I tried soaking my foot. This, too, did not work. So I walked, on my toes, to a pharmacy and asked for tweezers, trying to imitate what tweezers look like with my fingers.

"Pince?" The pharmacist asked me.

"Ci, ci, pince."

He imitated plucking his eyebrows just to make sure.

"No, no." I would never pluck my eyebrows. That's unmanly. "I have glass in my foot." So I'm tough.

He walked out of the shop with me and pointed to a makeup store.

In shame, I walked to the makeup store.

"Pince?" I asked.

"To pluck your eyebrows?" The woman answered me in English.

"Ci." I said defeated. "Economica." Cheap.

"Ci." She told me and took out some tweezers from under the counter. I inspected them.

They didn't look sharp enough.

"You see, I have glass in my foot. Maybe you have something sharper?"

"Ahh, you want these." She said, taking the expensive ones off the rack. "Afterwards you can give them as a present to a girl." She began folding them in tasteful wrapping paper.

"I don't think anyone would want tweezers that were inside my foot. And besides, this is probably not the last time I'll need to remove glass.

Six and a half euro later, I hobbled back to my boat. Tweezers in hand, I pulled the shard out of my foot and threw it into the sea.